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Amarok 2.3.2 Beta 1 "Sentinel" released

August 17, 2010 - 18:02 — Mamarok

It’s summertime! Can we have your attention nonetheless? We need your testing skills! Yes, you, dear Amarok lovers, we have been working against all odds, heatwaves, rain and thunderstorms, lovely beaches and landscapes to prepare a new version just for you. Trying to fight the hardest bugs, but still adding a few nice new features, our developers have integrated these goodies:
On the database level, you can import labels from older versions and only data for tracks in the collection is imported. We added various filter possibilities for podcasts (by provider or folder group) and the Collection Browser (last played, added, track format or filesize) and also added or corrected a few shortcuts.

Please see the full ChangeLog below and test everything you can. Help us improve Amarok, report your findings and contribute to make Amarok even better!

Join us and rediscover your music!

Features

Podcasts can now be filtered on provider and grouped in folders. (BR 219519)

It was totally my fault and unrelated to the new Amarok version... I had accidentally changed the owner of my music collection folder to something else than my account, Amarok was not able to write to it and therefore decided not to present it as an option to write files to...

However, it would be nice if the gui mentioned that at some place -- even after a full rescan of my collection folder it didn't notify me at all.

1. I LOVE THAT SONG.
2. Are you working on Amarok 2.4.x? I mean, how is going the separation between Amarok core components and plugins, and the code cleanup and refactoring?
3. When you actually release Amarok 2.4.x, on which Mike Oldfield album will you base your codenames? ;)

I agree with Dinho: "embedded cover art is a must have for me!". I'm still using Amarok 1.4 because of this (and some others) features.
I didn't understand "Remote Meta+P global shortcut to avoid future problems with new keyboard drivers in notebooks". Couldn't you just use another shortcut instead of Meta+P, why remove? I've been trying Amarok 2.3.2 for some days and I miss Meta+O (to show OSD) a lot and now Meta+P has been "bared" too?. As embedded cover art, a shortcut to toggle the main window is essential (as a way to configure the OSD like in older version).
I'm still not using Amarok 2 because I miss some features of Amarok 1.4 that I consider essential, but I really would like to upgrade. The visual is pretty beauty and you are doing a good job. I hope the next release convince me to migrate. Thank you.

Ah, of course, all the old bugs are still present in Amarok version 2.3.2 beta.

If I am listening to an internet radio, OSD does not work and notifications do not work with KNotify.
Amarok can not detect audio CDs (it succeeds only after dozens of attempts).
If I use the Xine backend, Amarok crashes while changing audio CD track.
If I use the GStreamer backend, Amarok skips from one track to another, but no sound.
etc, etc, etc.

All these bugs have been reported long ago but nothing happened.

New bugs in Amarok 2.3.2 beta.

Amarok is not able to find cddb data (2.3.1 works fine).

With some internet services that have two or more directories, only one directory can be viewed; others do not show anything.
For example, Sky FM has two directories. One is viewable while the other is not.

amarok has nothing to do with gstreamer or xine directly. Amarok uses KDE's Phonon multimedia player to play files. Phonon in turn has backens: GStreamer, Xine, VLC. The Gstreamer backend is unloved and unmaintained, and we recommend people to not use it. the xine backend is most functional, and the VLC backend is being heavily developed and is almost as good as the xine one (in my opinion).

The bugs regarding track metadata, and gst/xine backends are valid bugs, but not amarok ones. They are phonon bugs.

Ralph, you are not being fair with the developers. This is a Free and Open Source Projec that is both "free as speech and free as beer". It is driven by a community of volunteer people you can not demand people work for you unless you pay them. You can politely ask for a feature or even better help to get it.

Phonon and Amarok developers do work together. Part of the problem is that phonon-gst doesn't have maintainers, just people (usually from Linux distros) which troubleshoot whatever problem it is currently having.

Not all music can be found in Amazon--though most of them with English?French?German
But Amarok users' mother languages are not just these,their songs can't be found in Amazon?
Amarok 2.3.1 could search artworks from google yahoo and so on,it's not that convenient for a large number of songs.
We know mostly artworks are embeded in their music files--it's amazing amarok can't read these embedded artworks.

hey, maybe you did not notice, but filtering is incredibly useful. Lately, I've added some 600 songs to my collection, of which a lot was just electronic crap (2 minutes the same base isn't really what I like). Because these were very long (6 minutes and more), I just filtered them by length and deleted them. Useful.

I've not jumped from 1.4 yet, alas. I've been waiting on podcast and label support (my own personal "killer" features), notably the import of all my old labels (I really didn't want to re-label thousands of music files). I'm excited to see that I may not have to wait anymore.

I have tried the macports release a couple of times which never installed correctly. I fiddled around a lot, but after all, it's just a music player. While I really don't like iTunes, at least it does work. Maybe I will look into the fink release. Looks like they have Amarok 1.4 as well. I still think I would prefer that one anyhow.